American War Cinema and Media since Vietnam

Politics, Ideology, and Class

Patricia Keeton, Peter Scheckner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137277893
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

No other cinematic genre more sharply illustrates the contradictions of American society - notions about social class, politics, and socio-economic ideology - than the war film. This book examines the latest cycle of war films to reveal how they mediate and negotiate the complexities of war, class, and a military-political mission largely gone bad.

Part I

EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN WAR CINEMA AND MEDIA SINCE VIETNAM

INTRODUCTION

THREADING THE MILITARY INTO AMERICAN CULTURE: CINEMA AND FPS WAR VIDEO GAMES

It is impossible to overestimate the role of the US military in domestic politics, its effect on the present precarious state of the economiy, and ultimately its influence on mainstream media’s portrayal of the military in feature films, on television and, more recently, in spectacularly profitable war video games. These games are now more profitable than feature war movies, and because they routinely brand handguns and other militarized weapons, they are linked to America’s private arms industry.

Whereas once millions could merely watch war in the theater, now around the world in unprecedented numbers people can participate in the “virtual world” of war through war video games. The perspective of these games is the first-person shooter (FPS), where the player, looking down the barrel of the gun during simulated combat, becomes the shooter. Call of Duty, one of the most popular war video game franchises, published and owned by Activision and Aspyr Media and the largest publishers of Mac games, was first released in 2003. It is not a stretch to say that at least since then the Pentagon has managed to entice countless players to identify with the global US Special Forces missions on which these games are based. The world literally sees and vicariously experiences war and the US soldier at very close quarters.

The Pentagon now has financial connections with war game technologies. For example, America’s Army is a series of video games and other media developed by the army and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment (Kennedy 2002). By 2010 the Pentagon signed on with video games to recruit and train a generation of gamers who are already proficient in such games as Modern Warfare 2. In January of that year sales passed $1 billion. “The Army has really taken a hold of gaming technology,” said Marsha Berry, executive producer for the game America’s Army 3 (Hsu 2010).

It would be hard to overestimate the depth of the Pentagon’s reach into all aspects of American media culture, though it is most obvious in war videos. A 2013 Google search for “war video games websites” yields over 1.2 billion results, an astounding number. Individual games such as Call of Duty with over 20 different titles sell millions of copies each year, and in 2012, this franchise reported 40 million monthly active players, with 10 million Call of Duty: Elite users and 2 million paying annual members. Over 1.6 billion hours of online gameplay have been logged on Modern Warfare 3 since its 2011 release (Dutton 2012). By November 11, 2011, the Call of Duty series had sold over 100 million copies (Richmond 2011).

By comparison with war video games, American war movies comprise a small number of the hundreds of American movies released each year. In 2012 only four Hollywood war movies opened: Red Tails (Anthony Hemingway, Lucasfilm), Battleship (Peter Berg, distributed by Universal Pictures and made by a consortium of five studios), Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, Contrafilm Studio), and Zero Dark Thirty (Kathyrn Bigelow, Annapurna Pictures). The only big studio war film in 2011 was War Horse (Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Studios). Furthermore, in general, war does not do particularly well at the box office. The quintessential example of the relatively poor showing is The Hurt Locker (2009, Kathyrn Bigelow, Summit Entertainment and Universal Pictures) that won Academy Awards in 2009 for Best Picture and Director. Although it was more profitable than any other American war movie set in Iraq, it made less than any other Best Picture winner.

The all-time exception to this rule is Avatar (2009, James Cameron, Fox Studio), the highest grossing “war” movie ever. By the end of 2009 it had made $2.7 billion worldwide and $760.5 million domestically (“2012 Worldwide Grosses,” n.d.). However, in this case, the genre “war” movie is a bit elusive insofar as Avatar is set on Pandora, a moon, outside our solar system, in the twenty-second century, and half the combatants are not human. The war is between an indigenous insurgency (the Na’vi) fighting American mercenaries attempting to colonize their world.

Nevertheless even Avatar could barely compete with the games. In 2012 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 grossed $1 billion in 15 days, and its developer, Activision, “noted the $1 billion milestone was achieved faster than James Cameron’s Avatar, which in 2009 reached a billion in ticket sales in seventeen days” (Sliwinski 2012).

All major US wars since World War I are potential settings for video games, and since 9/11 when the war on terror officially began, the big ones such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor take place everywhere that American Special Forces operate. With their FPS perspective, players can now become virtual Special Forces combatants themselves. As entertainment—setting aside the politics of these wars and games (a side benefit for the Pentagon and the White House)—millions of virtual shooters can now enjoy war. No sooner does an actual war or mission end, it becomes a game. A war movie morphs into a video game or, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT), the other way around. ZDT was released in California on December 18, 2012, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s Zero Dark Thirty map pack, “featuring maps based on locations from the movie inspired by the search for Osama Bin Laden,” was available nearly two months earlier. By 2013 the FPS war game industry could declare itself the cultural and commercial winner in the lucrative, deeply rooted, and ever-expanding American industry of war.

FPS GAMES AND THE DOMESTIC GUN INDUSTRY

On December 14, 2012, the day of the mass shooting of 20 elementary school children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, America once again started to have a dialogue about the fact that 25 percent of adults own at least one gun, and that, according to the FBI, there are over 200 million privately owned firearms in this country. It subsequently came to light that the gun manufacturers had strong ties to the war video game industry. Immediately after Sandy Hook The New York Times reported this:

While studies have found no connection between video games and gun violence, the case of Medal of Honor Warfighter illustrates how the firearms and video game industries have quietly forged a mutually beneficial marketing relationship. Makers of firearms and related gear have come to see video games as a way to promote their brands to millions of potential customers, marketing experts said. Magpul and Electronic Arts made a video posted on YouTube about their partnership. (Meier and Martin 2012)

Six days later, these ties were increasingly made public:

According to [Robert] Farago, founder of The Truth About Guns [a website], the rise of first-person, warfare-centric video games has proved the most natural and fertile territory for the industry to tap and nudge new interest in its merchandise. Titles like the popular “Call of Duty” series, Farago said, are luring new gun enthusiasts to real-world shooting ranges where they seek out opportunities to fire the same high-powered, military-style weaponry that they encounter in video games—often under very specific brand names. “Video games are the most effective advertisements there are for firearms,” he said.

Steve Johnson, editor of The Firearm Blog has cataloged some of the many real-world guns that appear in the Activision game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3”—often with familiar name brands like Remington clearly printed on the body of the guns. When the game debuted last year, it grossed $1 billion in sales in just 16 days, according to the company (Zeller 2012).

ALL THIS PROFIT COMES WITH A CAVEAT

By the second decade of this century the saturation of all things martial in our culture was unmistakable. Super Bowl Sunday has been partnered with the military for decades. According to the US Department of Defense (DoD), “From Air Force fighter jet flyovers to Army parachutists dropping in at halftime, the US military and the National Football League have shared more than forty years of Super Bowl history” (Carden 2011).

Since the National Security State that established the Central Intelligence Agency and the DoD was legislated by the National Security Act of 1947 under President Truman, challenging military doctrine in America in any fundamental way by mainstream cinema, electronic media, or by national politicians is about as appealing as arguing that God does not exist. Nevertheless, all this comes with a caveat. However colossal the presence and investment of the American military is in American cinema and media, a truism exists: by and large the American military, and all armies everywhere, are primarily made from the ranks of working-class men and women. Soldiers are, by and large, workers with weapons and always have been. As far back as the eighth century BCE Homer described this reality in his epic war poem the Iliad. Clear social distinctions existed between the various kings, chieftains, and the ordinary Greek foot soldiers who fought in Troy. And not all benefited equally in the subsequent looting.

Invisible, perhaps, in all the techno glamour of FPS war video games, the romance and excitement of the Hollywood war film, or the awesome reach of America’s military around the globe is that workers need to be imbued with sufficient ideology to justify or rationalize how much of a sacrifice they are making. Even as early as 1990 when the Gulf War began, the Pentagon had to start its stop-loss policy because it had run out of enlisted personnel for its all-volunteer army. In 2004, three years after President Bush declared the war on terror was official, Presidential candidate John Kerry called this involuntary military service a “back-door draft.” Issues regarding social class, politics, and the ideology of America’s two wars began to loom ever greater, and the movies took notice.

Not long after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, Hollywood came to show, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, that not everyone benefits equally from war—or gives as much. This was evident on the field of combat. In addition, as nearly all home front feature films and returning veteran documentaries show, when the working-class former soldier returns from the battle zone, he or she is not always welcomed.

A BRIEF PROFILE OF AMERICA’S IMPERIAL FOREIGN POLICY

The business of war has, since World War II, become America’s preeminent business, a military-industrial consortium President Eisenhower famously warned against in his January 17, 1961, farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Fifty years later, to argue that America is, however provisionally, the last empire standing is hardly provocative. Now, however, four more legs to this consortium can be added: the entertainment industry of movies, TV, and video games; Congress, that approves nearly all military expenditures; the domestic gun industry; and since World War II the various and largely conservative think tanks that legitimate the whole war industry.

All these trends in commerce and media are the effects of the military colossus we’ve become, perhaps unprecedented on a world scale. Even after or perhaps because of two inconclusive and hugely expensive wars in Iraq (from 2001 to 2011) and in Afghanistan (2003 to the present), America’s army now straddles the world. The United States has bases in over 135 countries, and the total number of these outposts in 2005, according to US military sources, was 737 (Johnson 2007). America’s military budget surpasses those of China, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, and Australia combined, and US military expenditure now accounts for just under half of the world’s total. The United States spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, most of which are American allies. (“The Ten Countries with the Highest Military Spending Worldwide in 2011” 2012)

This unprecedented spending does not include the budgets of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program, the CIA’s drone operations, NASA’s military oriented satellites, or the budget of Veterans Affairs (Keller 2012). President Obama’s proposed defense budget for 2012 was $553 billion, an increase of $22 billion above the 2010 appropriation, and 16 percent of the entire federal budget. Since this does not include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if these costs were added, the military budget would take up approximately 19 percent of the federal government’s overall spending for the year and an estimated 28 percent of its tax revenues. The Pentagon is invested in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, guaranteeing that, to one extent or another, we are all invested in it.

The United States is the last remaining imperial power whose ultimate threat remains, in our century, armed invasion. At least when it comes to raw military force, America is still hegemonic, or trying to be. In 2010 The Washington Post reported this:

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia . . . Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the Defense Secretary or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (DeYoung and Jaffe 2010).

THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CLASS IN THE CINEMA OF WAR

Hollywood has always paid attention to America’s most violent expression of foreign policy. Indeed at the very beginning of the American film industry, the American Civil War along with Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan was the central subject of the silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915, D. W. Griffith). As for the sheer number of war movies this country produces, Southern Nazarine University, a Christian liberal arts university, lists on its website 510 full-length movies and documentaries (most but not all American made) just on the war in Vietnam, and Wikipedia lists 31 Hollywood feature films and television series about the war in Iraq. American made-for-television series or films on Iraq or Afghanistan have included Over There (2005, FX), Generation Kill (2008, HBO), Coming Home (2011, Lifetime), Homeland (2011, Showtime, about Afghanistan), Saving Jessica Lynch (2003, NBC, a film), and Baker Boys: Inside the Surge (2010, HDNet).

After the military draft was eliminated in 1973, Americans have enlisted for various reasons, though after the recession began in 2008, the reason became increasingly economic. In 2009, just after the recession began, The New York Times reporte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Evolution of American War Cinema and Media since Vietnam
• Part II   Representations of Workers as Warriors in Contemporary War Cinema and Media
• Part III   Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index